State Power, Social Power

Abstract

For both Hegel and Marx the separation of state and civil society is the distinctive political feature of modernity; in this separation political relations take the form of and are exercised through a separate state authority. Prior to Hegel the common distinction was not between ‘state’ and ‘civil society’, but ‘state and civil society’ on the one hand and the ‘state of nature’ on the other. The terms ‘civil society’ and ‘state’ were coterminous. In practice this meant that to be a member of civil society was to be a member of the state — a citizen.1 A distinction between the two only began to emerge about 1750, with works such as Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). For Hegel a number of historical developments make a conceptual distinction between state and civil society necessary. First, the French Revolution, which for Hegel posed the problem of the age: the political realization of freedom, in particular vis-a-vis the old ruling institutions.2 Second, the distinctly modern mode of production — industrialization — was clearly producing extremes of poverty and wealth, and a class which because of its poverty relies only on its labour. Third, the coming together of private individuals, in a sphere that is neither family nor state, involves a clash of wills, antagonism and tensions which appear nonpolitical. Relations in this sphere are conceptualized as imbued with conflict, requiring regulation by public authority.